Slumdog
by leafonthebreeze
Summary: Because angels don't come back for the bad guys, and Reno isn't going to heaven. He'll have to make do with rain and flowers and howling at the moon where he knows she isn't.


I haven't written fanfiction in a long long time. This is a very new style to me and hard to keep up. Concrit appreciated.

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Reno was a slum-dog and to the slums he would return some nights when the moon was too bright for the blue-green eyes of a boy who grew up too fast under neon lights. And if he chose to peer round the door of a church that shouldn't be there then it was on his time not the company's and what he found there was his business.

What he did find was a skinny little girl with eyes too wise for her age in a dress too clean and too pretty for a slum-child. He was fifteen and feeling fifty after selling his soul to the Shin-ra for a way to see the sky and she was everything he'd hoped he'd find up on the plate right here in a broken down church in sector five. A pretty girl with clear eyes and a little patch of flowers.

When she saw him she started up and eyed him warily like a cornered deer and the itchy trigger in his brain hovered just for a second towards destroying her and her little flowerpatch right here just for making him feel something. But that could lose him his job and if he was gonna become their trained attack dog he may as well act the part. So instead he raised an eyebrow and stared her out until her fear turned to defiance and she glared at him with all the anger of a twelve year old scorned.

"This is _my_ church. Stop staring at me"

"Relax. Church is God's house ain't it? I can be here jus' as much as you can."

She scowled and turned back to her flowers and did the best job she could at ignoring him outright. He watched her for a while then headed back out but the neon plate-light seemed a little bit harsher now.

That was the first time, anyway.

He kept coming back. She was friendly enough once she got used to him, treated him like any other slum kid that wandered into her church, and there were a few of them. The best part was she didn't know about the Shinra, didn't know about the stiff black suit that felt too big for him and the noose-tie round his neck. He helped her with the flowers and she smiled at him and teased him for his red hair and that would do for now.

She didn't know about the first time he killed a man for them either. He'd killed before, of course he had, he wouldn't be a Turk if he hadn't but that had been in angry street fights with bricks and knives and bare hands and he'd always been fighting for his life, kill or be killed, not the cold hard beatdown with his steely stick of lightning to a man who didn't know what hit him. And dammit if a part of him didn't thrill at it, at watching the body go limp, at the thought of the pain and the suffering that wasn't his. He clung to that feeling like a lifeboat but when he came to the church that evening he was a little too happy to be a kid again and that was a weakness he'd stamp out of himself before it killed him. That was the first time he trod on the flowers but her rage at him was too precious to waste so he figured he'd save that for another time and settled for picturing the whole little patch in flames and her tear-stained smoke-streaked face. Out loud he simply said "sorry" and flashed her a hang-dog grin that made her roll her eyes but forgive him.

Sometimes she wasn't there and he'd resist the urge to collapse into the flowers and sleep like a child but he found that here he could be still for the first time he could remember and he'd let his thoughts fade out and think of nothing.

But one day he'd slunk round the door of the church (Turks rarely let you know they're there until they're behind you and slumkids never do) and frozen because sitting in the pews was a dark haired man in a dark coloured suit talking softly to the pretty little girl that was supposed to be _his_ secret. In a flash his lighter was in his hand and he was ready to burn the place down and walk away because if she wasn't his to ruin when he wanted to she sure as hell couldn't be anyone else's but Tseng was his boss and he was more then pretending to be their trained attack dog by now so he slunk back out because whatever was happening there he didn't want to know.

He stopped going to the church after that.

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I did actually write a bit more then this but I wasn't sure about it. I could put it up if people are interested.


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